Last night I watched "The Prisoner of Zenda." Both versions. One of my favorite scenes is when the fake King is scaling the castle wall after having a swim in the moat.

There's been a lot of talk recently about POWER7 scaling. Scaling is very important because it shows us what a system can really do, whether it's a small system or a system at the very high end.

It is imperative to stick with the same system when you are doing your scaling analysis -- the same system, chip, GHz, system software, benchmark. If you don't, you're not getting the true scaling ratio. As an example, look at SPECfp_rate2006 on the Power 780 as you go from 16 cores to 64 cores. The scaling ratio is over 95%. (1) I saw a comment on this recently from one of my favorite analysts - "No other system on the planet can scale . . . at that close of a linear scaling ratio."

"Fate doesn't always make the right men kings." In this case, the right man and the right systems scaled the wall.